Joey Cheek — William Joseph Cheek was born on June 22, 1979, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He is an American speed skater and former inline speed skater. He specializes in the short and middle distances. Accomplishments Cheek’s breakthrough was in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, where he won the bronze medal in the 1,000 meters and just …

The encoded cylinder refers to the Cyrillic Projector sculpture by American artist James Sanborn which was created in the early 1990s. The 32-character Cyrillic alphabet has been used on it with the Russian word for ‘shadow’ — TEHb —appearing several times. For long, no one was able to crack the code but it was finally solved in 2003. The sculpture …

AK-47 stands for Russian Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947 (Automatic Kalashnikov 1947). Designed by Russian Mikhail Kalashnikov, it was the assault rifle used by most Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War. The rifle was adopted and standardized in 1947, thus the name.

Large blocks of floating ice, called pack ice, cover much of the Arctic Ocean and the seas around Antarctica. Pack ice was a problem for explorers. In 1915, the Endurance, the ship used by Sir Ernest Shackleton to reach Antarctica, was crushed by pack ice and sank. The first ship to reach the North Pole was the Russian atomic icebreaker …

Unless you are a meteorologist (a person who studies the weather), it is unlikely that you will know that this is, in fact, a coded description of the climate of the Mediterranean regions. Devised by a Russian meteorologist, Vladimir Koppen, in the early 20th century, the code (see below) is based mainly on temperature and rainfall and is now used …

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) recommendation defines the international public telecommunication numbering plan used in the PSTN. It also defines the format of phone numbers. As per these recommendations, numbers can have a maximum of 15 digits and are usually written with a + prefix. CCITT, the predecessor of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector, developed the first formal list of telephone …

This was Hector Hugh Munro, born in Burma on November 12, 1870. His fame as a writer rests on his brilliant short stories which have been collected in several volumes such as Reginald, Reginald in Russia and The Chronicles of Clovis. He was only a child when his mother died and, in Devonshire, England, he was brought up by two …

James Bond. Ian Fleming introduced Bond in his novel Casino Royal which was first published in 1953. Ian Fleming was born May 28, 1908 and educated at Eton Collage and then the military academy, Sandhurst. He worked with the well-known news agency Reuters and later as the foreign manager of a newspaper combine. Among his other Bond novels are Live …

The name under which the he wrote his many sea-faring novels was Joseph Conrad. He was born in the Ukraine in Russia on December 6, 1857. His boyhood was passed in Caracow in Poland. There he learned to speak and write French fluently and first began to take a great interest in the sea. At the age of 17 he …

Jared Mason Diamond is an American evolutionary biologist, physiologist, bio-geographer, lecturer, and nonfiction author. Diamond works as a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA. He is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which also won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science. The preeminent scholar of the relationship between the environment and civilisational success …